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News Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web | The New York Times

By Bari Weiss May 16, 2018

Bari Weiss profiles the “Intellectual Dark Web,” (I.D.W.) a group of loosely-connected thinkers that are getting more attention than ever before in our fraught era of discourse. She argues that whether or not she agrees with them, their provocative lines of thought, circulated primarily in non-mainstream corners of the internet, are clearly influential and undoubtedly big business.

What is the I.D.W. and who is a member of it? It’s hard to explain, which is both its beauty and its danger.

Most simply, it is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. Feeling largely locked out of legacy outlets, they are rapidly building their own mass media channels.

The closest thing to a phone book for the I.D.W. is a sleek website that lists the dramatis personae of the network, including Mr. Harris; Mr. Weinstein and his brother and sister-in-law, the evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying; Jordan Peterson, the psychologist and best-selling author; the conservative commentators Ben Shapiro and Douglas Murray; Maajid Nawaz, the former Islamist turned anti-extremist activist; and the feminists Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christina Hoff Sommers. But in typical dark web fashion, no one knows who put the website up.

Source: Opinion | Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web – The New York Times